Recently, in the field design of various products such as machines or ships, collaborative design has emerged as an important issue in the product development process.
Especially, the design of a large vessel such as a container ship, an LNG carrier ship or an oil tanker is often a massive undertaking to which a huge number of designers need to devote their time up to several months at average. Therefore, it is general that many designers collaborate on the design of the vessels in order to shorten the time required. Thus, designers in the shipyard need to collaborate with partners from various other outside companies to which they have outsourced their design works.
Meanwhile, the outside companies and partners who participate in the ship design process commonly use different computer-aided design (CAD) systems that they prefer or that they choose to optimize the design tasks assigned to them. Even within a single company, designers may use different CAD systems that are most suitable for their tasks. That is, throughout the entire ship design process, the shipyard usually uses a CAD system developed for CAD processing of ship design (hereinafter, referred to as a “ship CAD system”), whereas their partner companies involved in various partial design tasks such as design of ship equipment or the like mainly utilize mechanical CAD (MCAD) systems.
Thus, in order to collect and integrate the partial designs created by the individual partners outside the shipyard using the various MCAD systems and to import those individual designs into the ship CAD system used in the shipyard, it is necessary to convert design data between the different kinds of CAD systems, i.e., between the MCAD systems and the ship CAD system. For example, in the mechanical CAD systems, the term “feature” is used to designate a modeling unit that constitutes a CAD file, whereas the term “primitive” is used in the ship CAD system for the same purpose. Hence, it is necessary to convert CAD data through appropriate direct or indirect mapping between features and primitives.
In this regard, disclosed in Korean Patent No. 10-038211 registered on Apr. 24, 2003 is a technique directed to a component information providing system for providing three-dimensional CAD model data, which has parametrics information, in the form of digital catalog.
Conventionally, however, there has been proposed no specific framework for a direct or indirect mapping operation between modeling units in the process of converting a CAD file produced by a MCAD system to a CAD file applicable to the ship CAD system. Thus, many problems have occurred during the process of applying the CAD file created by the MCAD system to the ship CAD system.